Oct 15, 2021 | Latest
My review of Derek Scally’s book, The Best Catholics in the World was published in last Saturday’s Irish Examiner, 9 October. Here it is: That old Latin phrase, Corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst of all) explains the...
Oct 7, 2021 | Latest
Behind West Belfast sits Black Mountain. Hardly a towering elevation it is round with no discernible peak. Yet to locals it is an intimate friend, embracing and mystically comforting, from one’s childhood through to old age. It is loved. It is beautiful and charming...
Sep 13, 2021 | Latest
Ciaran Quinn is the Sinn Féin Representative to North America. Here he reviews Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground by Susan McKay. -oo0oo- Susan McKay’s book is a master class in the art of listening and a damning indictment of the failure of dialogue.* The book...
Sep 5, 2021 | Latest
My German publisher, Elsinor, has just reissued Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, edited and annotated with a preface by my German translator, Jörg W. Rademacher and an afterword by Michael Szczekalla. The new edition of the book, and the irony of...
Jul 29, 2021 | Latest
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who led Portugal’s ‘Carnation’ Revolution in 1974 died this week at the age of 84, at the Military Hospital in Lisbon. On 25 April 1974 Carvalho who’d been an army officer serving in Portugal’s colonies, fighting the MPLA in Angola and...
